The Nine Gates to the Kingdom of Shadows Tutorial

How to Make Your Own

“Nine Gates to the Kingdom of Shadows”

About the book:

The Nine Gates to the Kingdom of Shadows, written by Aristide Torchia, Venice 1666. A book purportedly based on the abhorred Delomelanicon(a tome said to have been written by the Devil himself!). Torchia, along with his blasphemous works, were put to the flame in 1667. But Torchia revealed that he had left one copy behind. The problem is that three copies of the “Nine Gates” are known to exist, one owned by Victor Fargas, one by the Kessler Foundation, and one recently acquired by Boris Balkan. Which one is the real one? Or are they all forgeries? Enter, Dean Corso, a sort of book-detective/mercenary, determined to solve the riddle, only he gets caught up in a supernatural web all his own and all the players are linked together by this nefarious book.

This is the premise of Roman Polanski’s film, “The Ninth Gate”. Based on the bestseller The Club Dumas by Arturo Perez-Reverte.

I have had a large number of requests for a guide on how to make your own Nine Gates to the Kingdom of Shadows. So on these pages I am putting up some of the information I have on how to make this singular tome.

This is not a project for the timid.

I will not make the book for you. After all, pseudo-hermetic knowledge, even when fictional, must be earned. 😉 Also, I do not sell copies of the books. This prop project was a labor of love and fun while it lasted, but it was also a collosal pain to research and get right. I have my copy and I am not making anymore, so please do not ask.

What you will find here is some of the text and engravings and some mini-tutorials about how to age the pages (if you’re printing on white paper) and even how to recreate a binding of sorts. (The Binding will not look like the binding shown in the picture. That binding was professionally done and cost a pretty penny, but it should be enough to get folks by).

Just to answer some of the questions up front. I got the chapter titles and the text directly from a screen-used source. So it is very accurate. Now, this is a kind of Do-it-yourself tome making project and I am not going to do all the work for you, so please do not ask. What I’m providing here will give you an excellent start at making a good 9 Gates replica of your own. If you want to make it 100% screen accurate then you will have a long way to go. But this will allow you to make a very respectable replica.

The dimensions of the book are 6.5 inches wide by 10 inches long by 1.25 inches thick. The pentacle on the cover is 3 inches wide along each arm, tip to tip.

The Text

Here you will find a file on how to make your own text for the Nine Gates. You will need to install the JSL Ancient font. And you will have to do some of your own work. What I am providing here: the 9 chapter title pages formatted correctly to print out on 8.5 x 11 sheets, and end of chapter page (as an example, you have to create 8 more), and 30 or so pages of filler-text that you can clone to fill out your book (the text is roughly 300 pages long). When cutting the pages to size, a good rule of thumb is to cut them in order to leave a 1 inch or 1.25 inch margin from the text.

The artist Francisco Sole created the woodcuts for the Nine Gates and for the novel The Club Dumas by Arturo Perez-Reverte. What I am providing here are the woodcuts that were directly scanned from a licensed journal that used to be available. They are in TIF format and good quality. If you wish to try and scan these yourself, these identical woodcuts can be found in the liner notes of “The Ninth Gate” soundtrack CD. If you want the novel versions of the engravings, please go and buy the novel and scan them. If you’re even on this page and you haven’t read The Club Dumas you owe it to yourself to read it.

In the film, Corso discovers a postcard of “La Tour du Diable” tucked into the Baroness Kessler’s book. I have had a lot of requests for this postcard and I provide it here. Front and back. The dimensions should be 4×6 when you print it out.